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History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)
Encyclopedia
The History of the Soviet Union between 1927 and 1953 was dominated by Joseph Stalin
, who sought to reshape Soviet society with aggressive economic planning
, in particular a sweeping collectivization of agriculture and development of industrial power. He introduced his "Westernizer" ideals to the Soviet Union by broadly and thoroughly reforming Soviet policy; such was exemplified by a period of rapid industrialization. He also promoted a secret police
and a mass mobilization
party, which led to millions of deaths as a result of purges and collectivization efforts.
World War II, known as "The Great Patriotic War
" in the Soviet Union, devastated much of the USSR with about one out of every three World War II deaths being a citizen of the Soviet Union
. After World War II, the Soviet Union's armies occupied eastern Europe, where Communist governments came to power into the Soviet bloc
, whilst in western Europe
, capitalist governments were established, with the help of aid provided by the United States. The Cold War
developed as the USSR and the United States struggled indirectly for influence
around the world.
in December 1927, Joseph Stalin
attacked the left by expelling Leon Trotsky
and his supporters from the party and then moving against the right by abandoning Vladimir Lenin
's New Economic Policy
which had been championed by Nikolai Bukharin
and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov. Warning delegates of an impending capitalist encirclement, he insisted that survival and development could only occur by pursuing the rapid development of heavy industry
.
The party, under Stalin's direction, established Gosplan
(the State Planning Commission), a state organization responsible for guiding the socialist economy towards accelerated industrialization. In April 1929 Gosplan released two drafts that began the process that would industrialize the primarily agrarian nation. This 1,700 page report became the basis of the First Five-Year Plan
for National Economic Construction, or Piatiletka, calling for the doubling of Soviet capital stock between 1928 and 1933.
Shifting from Lenin's NEP, the first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making and the stress on rapid heavy industrialization (see Economy of the Soviet Union
). It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth
.
The new economic system put forward by the first Five-Year plan involved a complicated series of planning arrangements (see Overview of the Soviet economic planning process). The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal
, iron
, and other vital resources. Despite approximately 1,000,000 deaths this process was largely successful, and caused long-term industrial growth more rapid than any country in history.
The mobilization of resources by state planning expanded the country's industrial base. From 1928 to 1932, peak iron
output, necessary for further development of the industrial infrastructure rose from 3.3 million to 6.2 million tons per year. Coal
, the integral product fueling modern economies and Stalinist industrialization, successfully rose from 35.4 million to 64 million tons, and output of iron ore rose from 5.7 million to 19 million tons. A number of industrial complexes such as Magnitogorsk
and Kuznetsk
, the Moscow and Gorky
automobile plants, the Urals and Kramatorsk heavy machinery plants, and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk tractor
plants had been built or were under construction.
In real terms, the workers' standards of living tended to drop, rather than rise during the industrialization. Stalin's laws to "tighten work discipline" made the situation worse: e.g., a 1932 change to the RSFSR labor law code enabled firing workers who had been absent without a reason from the work place for just one day. Being fired accordingly meant losing "the right to use ration and commodity cards" as well as the "loss of the right to use an apartment″ and even blacklisted for new employment which altogether meant a threat of starving. Those measures, however, were not fully enforced, as managers often desperately needed to hire new workers. In contrast, the 1938 legislation, which introduced labor books, followed by major revisions of the labor law, were enforced. For example, being absent or even 20 minutes late were grounds for becoming fired; managers who failed to enforce these laws faced criminal prosecution. Later, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 26 June 1940 "On the Transfer to the Eight-Hour Working Day, the Seven-day Work Week, and on the Prohibition of Unauthorized Departure by Laborers and Office Workers from Factories and Offices″ replaced the 1938 revisions with obligatory criminal penalties for quitting a job (2–4 months imprisonment), for being late 20 minutes (6 months of probation and pay confiscation of 25 per cent), etc.
Based on these figures the Soviet government declared that Five Year Industrial Production Plan had been fulfilled by 93.7% in only four years, while parts devoted to heavy−industry part were fulfilled by 108%. Stalin in December 1932 declared the plan a success to the Central Committee, since increases in the output of coal
and iron
would fuel future development.
During the second five−year plan (1933–37), on the basis of the huge investment during the first plan, industry expanded extremely rapidly, and nearly reached the plan. By 1937 coal output was 127 million tons, pig iron 14.5 million tons, and there had been very rapid developments in the armaments industry.
While undoubtedly marking a massive leap in industrial capacity, the first Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18−hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 1932). Due to the allocation of resources for industry along with decreasing productivity since collectivization, a famine occurred. The use of forced labor must also not be overlooked. In the construction of the industrial complexes, inmates of labor camp
s were used as expendable resources. But conditions improved rapidly during the second plan. Throughout the 1930s, industrialization was combined with a rapid expansion of education at schools and in higher education.
From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state−guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter−revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camp
s, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation. Other estimates put these figures much higher. Much like with the famines, the evidence supporting these high numbers is disputed by some historians, although this is a minority view. The peak of the repressions was during the great Purge of 1937–8, and it had the effect of greatly slowing down production in 1937.
. Upon joining kolkhoz
es (collective farms), peasants had to give up their private plots of land and property, and the kolkhoz produce was sold to the state for a low price set by the state itself. However, the natural progress of collectivization was slow, and the November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee
decided to implement accelerated, forced collectivization.
Given the goals of the first Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy−industrialization.
By 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. In many cases peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms, even though the Government only wanted the grain. Kulak
s, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan
, Siberia
and the Russian Far North (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak". The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant some executions, and much greater deportation to special settlements and sometimes to forced labor camps.
Despite the expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization was particularly severe in Ukraine, and the heavily Ukrainian adjoining Volga regions, a fact which has led many Ukrainian scholars to argue that there was a deliberate policy of starving the Ukrainians (see Holodomor
for more information). The number of people who died in the famines is estimated at between three and ten million in Ukraine alone, not counting the adjoining regions of Russia. There are disputed accounts on the actual number of 'victims' as estimated by other countries. Soviet sources vary between denying the existence of the famine and estimating much smaller numbers of dead. The actual number of casualties is bitterly disputed to this day. In 1975, Abramov and Kocharli estimated that 265,800 kulak
families were sent to the Gulag
in 1930. In 1979, Roy Medvedev
used Abramov's and Kocharli's estimate to calculate that 2.5 million peasants were exiled between 1930 and 1931, but he suspected that he underestimated the total number. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union huge numbers of archival files have been opened, and it is possible to make more accurate estimates.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the collectivization of agriculture was started in 1948. By terror, killings and deportations, most peasants were collectivized by 1952. Agricultural production fell dramatically to the level of Soviet agriculture in the other Soviet Republics.
Employment rose greatly; 3.9 million per year was expected by 1923, but the number was actually an astounding 6.4 million. By 1937, the number rose yet again, to about 7.9 million, and in 1940 it was 8.3 million. Between 1926 and 1930, the urban population increased by 30 million. Unemployment
had been a problem during the time of the Tsar and even under the NEP, but it was not a major factor after the implementation of Stalin's industrialization program. The mobilization of resources to industrialize the agrarian society created a need for labor, meaning that the unemployment went virtually to zero. Unemployment was also eliminated by fixing wages, which dropped in real terms by 50% from 1928 to 1940, thus making it financially viable for the state to employ so many workers. Several ambitious projects were begun, and they supplied raw materials not only for military weapons but also for consumer goods.
The Moscow and Gorky
automobile plants produced automobiles that the public could utilize, although not necessarily afford, and the expansion of heavy plant and steel production made production of a greater number of cars possible. Car and truck production, for example, reached 200,000 in 1931.
Because the industrial workers needed to be educated, the number of schools increased. In 1927, 7.9 million students attended 118,558 schools. This number rose to 9.7 million students and 166,275 schools by 1933. In addition, 900 specialist departments and 566 institutions were built and functioning by 1933. Literacy rates increased substantially as a result, especially in the Central Asian republics.
The Soviet people also benefited from a type of social liberalization. Women were to be given an adequate, equal education, and legally had equal rights in employment. In practice, these goals were not reached, but the efforts to achieve them and the statement of theoretical equality led to improvements in socio−economic status for women. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which was a massive improvement over the health care system under the Tsars. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people access to free health care and education. Widespread immunization programs created the first generation free from the fear of typhus
and cholera
. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record−low numbers and infant mortality rates were reduced by many times, resulting in the life expectancy
for both men and women increasing by over 20 years by the mid to late 1950s. Many of the more extreme social and political ideas that were fashionable in the '20s such as anarchism, internationalism, and the belief that the nuclear family was a bourgeois concept were abandoned. Schools began to teach a more nationalistic course with emphasis on Russian history and leaders, although always with Marxist underpinnings. Stalin also began to create a Lenin cult. It was during the '30s that Soviet society assumed the basic form it would have until the end in 1991.
Urban women under Stalin were also the first generation of women able to give birth in a hospital with access to prenatal care. Education was another area in which there was improvement after economic development. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near−universally literate generation. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract. Transport links were also improved, as many new railways were built, although with forced labour, costing thousands of lives. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovite
s, received many incentives for their work, although many such workers were in fact "arranged" to succeed by receiving extreme help in their work, and then their achievements were used for propaganda.
Starting in the early 1930s, the Soviet government began an all-out war on organized religion in the country. Many churches and monasteries were closed and scores of clergymen were imprisoned or executed. The state propaganda machine vigorously promoted atheism and denounced religion as being an artifact of capitalist society. In 1937, Pope Pius XI decried the attacks on religion in the Soviet Union. By 1940, only a small number of churches remained open. It should be noted that the early anti-religious campaigns under Lenin were mostly directed at the Russian Orthodox Church, as it was a symbol of the czarist government. In the 1930s however, all faiths were targeted: minority Christian denominations, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.
. Trotsky had already been expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan
in 1928 and then expelled from the USSR entirely in 1929. Stalin used the purges to politically and physically destroy his other formal rivals (and former allies) accusing Grigory Zinoviev
and Lev Kamenev
of being behind Kirov's assassination and planning to overthrow Stalin. Ultimately, those supposedly involved in this and other conspiracies numbered in the tens of thousands with various Old Bolsheviks and senior party members blamed with conspiracy and sabotage which were used to explain industrial accidents, production shortfalls and other failures of Stalin's regime. Measures used against opposition and suspected opposition ranged from imprisonment in work camps (Gulag
s) to execution to assassination (of Trotsky's son Lev Sedov and likely of Sergei Kirov—Trotsky himself was to die at the hands of one of Stalin's assassins in 1940).
Several show trial
s were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army
generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky
(June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One
(including Bukharin) in March 1938. See also: Moscow Trials
. During these, the defendants were typically accused of things such as sabotage, spying, counter-revolution, and conspiring with Germany and Japan to invade and partition the Soviet Union. Most confessed to the charges. The initial trials in 1935-1936 were carried out by the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda
. The following year, he and his associates were removed from office and arrested. They were later tried and executed in 1938-1939. The secret police were renamed the NKVD
and control given to Nikolai Yezhov
, known as the "Bloody Dwarf".
The "Great Purge" swept the Soviet Union in 1937. It was widely known as the "Yezhovschina", the "Reign of Yezhov". The rate of arrests was staggering. In the armed forces alone, three of five marshals were eliminated along with 90% of the generals, 80% of the colonels, and all the regional commanders, a total of more than 30,000 officers. The entire Politburo and most of the Central Committee were purged, along with foreign communists who were living in the Soviet Union, and numerous intellectuals, bureaucrats, and factory managers. The total of people imprisoned or executed during the Yezhovschina numbered about two million. By 1938, the mass purges were starting to disrupt the country's infrastructure, and Stalin began winding them down. Yezhov was gradually relieved of power. Yezhov was relieved of all powers in 1939, then tried and executed in 1940. His successor as head of the NKVD (from 1938 to 1945) was Lavrentiy Beria
, a Georgian
friend of Stalin's. Arrests and executions continued into 1940, although nothing on the scale of the Yezhovschina ever happened again.
During this period, the practice of mass arrest
, torture, and imprisonment or execution without trial, of anyone suspected by the secret police of opposing Stalin's regime became commonplace. By the NKVD's own count, 681,692 people were shot during 1937–38 alone, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were transported to Gulag work camps.
The mass terror and purges were little known to the outside world, and many western intellectuals continued to believe that the Soviets had created a successful alternative to a capitalist world that was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. In 1936, the country adopted its first formal constitution
, which on paper at least granted freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.
In March 1939, the 18th congress of the Communist Party was held in Moscow. Most of the delegates present at the 17th congress in 1934 were gone, and Stalin was heavily praised by Litvinov and the western democracies criticized for failing to adopt the principles of "collective security" against Nazi Germany.
. Indeed, many had actively opposed the very establishment of Soviet rule by meddling in the Russian Civil War
. Slowly the international community had to accept, however, that the Soviet Union was there to stay. They could not simply ignore the new, ascending great power. By 1933, France
, Germany
, Great Britain
and Japan, along with many other countries had recognized the Soviet government and established diplomatic ties. On November 16, 1933, the United States joined the list. Thus, by the 1930s, Soviet Russia was no longer an international pariah.
Franco−Soviet relations were initially hostile because the USSR officially opposed the World War I peace settlement of 1919 that France emphatically championed. While the Soviet Union was interested in conquering territories in Eastern Europe, France was determined to protect the fledgling nations there. This led to a rosy German−Soviet relationship in the 1920s. However, Adolf Hitler
's foreign policy centered on a massive seizure of Eastern European and Russian lands for Germany's own ends, and when Hitler pulled out of the World Disarmament Conference
in Geneva
in 1933, the threat hit home. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov
reversed Soviet policy regarding the Paris Peace Settlement, leading to a Franco−Soviet rapprochement. In May 1935, the USSR concluded pacts of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia
; the Comintern
was also instructed to form a united front
with leftist parties against the forces of Fascism
. The pact was undermined, however, by strong ideological hostility to the Soviet Union and the Comintern's new front in France, Poland
's refusal to permit the Red Army
on its soil, France's defensive military strategy, and a continuing Soviet interest in patching up relations with Germany.
The Soviet Union also supplied military aid to the Republicans
in Spain, but held back somewhat. Its support of the government also gave the Republicans a Communist taint in the eyes of anti−Bolsheviks in the UK and France, weakening the calls for Anglo−French intervention in the war.
In response to all of this the Nazi government promulgated an Anti-Comintern Pact
with Japan
and later Italy
and various Eastern European countries (such as Hungary
), ostensibly to suppress Communist activity but more realistically to forge an alliance against the USSR.
When Nazi Germany entered Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union's agreement with Czechoslovakia failed to amount to anything because of Poland and Romania
's refusals to permit a Soviet intervention. On April 17, 1939, Stalin suggested a revived military alliance with the UK and France. The Anglo−French military mission sent in August, however, failed to impress Soviet officials; it was sent by a slow ocean−going ship and consisted of low−ranking officers who gave only vague details about their militaries. Stalin favoured Germany.
Stalin arranged the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
, a non−aggression pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, along with the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement
to open economic relations. A secret appendix to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia
, Estonia
, Bessarabia
and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania
to Nazi Germany. This reflected the Soviet desire of territorial gains.
Propaganda was also considered an important foreign relations tool. International exhibitions, the distribution of media such as films and journals like USSR in Construction
, as well as inviting prominent foreign individuals to tour the Soviet Union, were used as a method of gaining international influence.
on September 1; the USSR followed
on September 17. The Soviets quelled opposition by executions and by arresting thousands. They sent hundreds of thousands to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR. Estimates varying from the accepted figure over 1.5 million. to the most conservative figures using recently found NKVD documents showing 309,000 to 381,220. in four major waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941. (See Soviet invasion of Poland
.)
With Poland being divided between two powers, the Soviet Union put forth its territorial demands to Finland for a minor part of the Karelian Isthmus
, a naval base at Hanko
(Hangö) peninsula and some islands in the Gulf of Finland
. Finland rejected the demands and on November 30, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, thus triggering the Winter War
. Despite outnumbering Finnish troops by over 2.5:1, the war proved embarrassingly difficult for the Red Army, which was ill-equipped for the winter weather and lacking competent commanders since the purge of the Soviet high command. The Finns resisted fiercely, and received considerable support and sympathy from the Allies. But in the spring of 1940, the snows melted, and a renewed Soviet offensive compelled them to surrender and relinquish the Karelia Isthmus and some smaller territories.
In 1940, the USSR occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On June 14, 1941, the USSR performed first mass deportations from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. (See Occupation of Baltic Republics
.)
On June 26, 1940 the Soviet government issued an ultimatum to the Romanian minister in Moscow, demanding Romania immediately cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Italy and Germany, which needed a stable Romania and access to its oil fields urged King Carol II
to do so. Under duress, with no prospect of aid from France or Britain, Carol complied. On June 28, Soviet troops crossed the Dniester and occupied Bessarabia
, Northern Bukovina, and the Herta region. (See Soviet occupation of Bessarabia.)
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler
abruptly broke the non−aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union
. Soviet intelligence was fooled by German disinformation and sent to Moscow false alarms about German invasion in April, May and beginning of June. Despite the popular myth there was no warning "Germany will attack on 22 June without declaration of war", moreover, Soviet intelligence reported that Germany would either invade the USSR after fall of the British Empire or after an unacceptable ultimatum demanding German occupation of Ukraine during the German invasion of Britain.
Like in Sino-Soviet conflict
on Chinese Eastern Railway or Soviet-Japanese border conflicts
Soviet troops on western border received a directive undersigned by Marshal
Semyon Timoshenko
and General of the Army
Georgy Zhukov
that ordered (as demanded by Stalin): "do not answer to any provocations" and "do not undertake any (offensive) actions without specific orders" - which meant that Soviet troops could open fire only on their soil and forbade counter-attack on German soil.
And so, the Nazi invasion caught the Soviet military unprepared. In the larger sense, Stalin expected invasion but not so soon. The Army had been decimated by the Purges; time was needed for a recovery of competence. As such, mobilization did not occur and the Soviet Army was unprepared in that tactical sense, when the invasion occurred. The initial weeks of the war were a disaster, with tens of thousands of men being killed, wounded, or captured. Whole divisions disintegrated against the German onslaught.
It is said that Stalin, at first, refused to believe Nazi Germany
had broken the treaty. However, new evidence shows Stalin held meetings with a variety of senior Soviet government and military figures, including Vyacheslav Molotov
(People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Semyon Timoshenko
(People's Commissar for Defense), Georgy Zhukov
(Chief of Staff of the Red Army), Nikolai Kuznetsov
(Commander of both North Caucasus and Baltic Military Districts), and Boris Shaposhnikov
(Deputy People's Commissar for Defense). All in all, on the very first day of the attack, Stalin held meetings with over 15 individual members of the Soviet government and military apparatus.
German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, but failed to capture it, due to staunch Soviet defence and counterattacks. At the Battle of Stalingrad
in 1942–43the Red Army inflicted a crushing defeat on the German army. Due to the unwillingness of the Japanese to open a second front in Manchuria
, the Soviets were able to call dozens of Red Army divisions back from eastern Russia. These units were instrumental in turning the tide, because most of their officer corps had escaped Stalin's purges. The Soviet forces soon launched massive counter attacks along the entire German line. By 1944, the Germans had been pushed out of the Soviet Union onto the banks of the Vistula River, just east of Prussia. With Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov
attacking from Prussia, and Marshal Konev slicing Germany in half from the south the fate of Nazi Germany
was sealed. On May 2, 1945 the last German troops surrendered to the overjoyed Soviet troops in Berlin.
) and western Germany (later called Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech, etc., were then moved onto German land.
An atmosphere of patriotic emergency took over the Soviet Union during the war, and persecution of the Orthodox Church was halted. The Church was now permitted to operate with a fair degree of freedom, so long as it did not get involved in politics. In 1944, a new Soviet national anthem was written, replacing the Internationale, which had been used as the national anthem since 1918. These changes were made because it was thought that the people would respond better to a fight for their country than for a political ideology.
The Soviets bore the brunt of World War II because the West did not open up a second ground front in Europe until the invasion of Italy and the Battle of Normandy
. Approximately 26.6 million Soviets, among them 18 million civilians, were killed in the war. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis. The retreating Soviet army was ordered to pursue a 'scorched earth
' policy whereby retreating Soviet troops were ordered to destroy civilian infrastructure and food supplies so that the Nazi German troops could not use them.
Stalin's original declaration in March 1946 that there were 7 million war dead was revised in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev
with a round number of 20 million. In the late 1980s, demographers in the State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat
) took another look using demographic methods and came up with an estimate of 26–27 million. A variety of other estimates have been made. In most detailed estimates roughly two-thirds of the estimated deaths were civilian losses. However, the breakdown of war losses by nationality is less well known. One study, relying on indirect evidence from the 1959 population census, found that while in terms of the aggregate human losses the major Slavic groups suffered most, the largest losses relative to population size were incurred by minority nationalities mainly from European Russia, among groups from which men were mustered to the front in "nationality battalions" and appear to have suffered disproportionately.
After the war, the Soviet Union occupied and dominated Eastern Europe, in line with their particular Marxist ideology.
Stalin was determined to punish those peoples he saw as collaborating with Germany during the war and to deal with the problem of nationalism, which would tend to pull the Soviet Union apart. Millions of Poles, Latvians, Georgians, Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities were deported to Gulags in Siberia. (Previously, following the 1939 annexation of eastern Poland
, thousands of Polish Army officers, including reservists, had been executed in the spring of 1940, in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre
.) In addition, in 1941, 1943 and 1944 several whole nationalities had been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia, including, among others, the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush
, Balkars
, Crimean Tatars
, and Meskhetian Turks. Though these groups were later politically "rehabilitated", some were never given back their former autonomous regions.
At the same time, in a famous Victory Day toast in May 1945, Stalin extolled the role of the Russian people above all in the defeat of the fascists: "I would like to raise a toast to the health of our Soviet people and, before all, the Russian people. I drink, before all, to the health of the Russian people, because in this war they earned general recognition as the leading force of the Soviet Union among all the nationalities of our country.… And this trust of the Russian people in the Soviet Government was the decisive strength, which secured the historic victory over the enemy of humanity – over fascism.…"
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The Soviet Union was especially devastated due to the mass destruction of the industrial base that it had built up in the 1930s. The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1946–48 due to war devastation that cost an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reduced fertility. However, the Soviet Union recovered its production capabilities and overcame pre−war capabilities, becoming the country with the most powerful land army in history by the end of the war, and having the most powerful military production capabilities.
program, the Soviet production of war materials was greater than that of Nazi Germany because of rapid growth of Soviet industrial production during the interwar years (additional supplies from lend−lease accounted for about 10–12% of the Soviet Union's own industrial output). The Second Five Year Plan raised steel
production to 18 million tons and coal
to 128 million tons. Before it was interrupted, the Third Five Year Plan produced no less than 19 million tons of steel and 150 million tons of coal.
The Soviet Union's industrial output provided an armaments industry which supported their army, helping it resist the Nazi military offensive. According to Robert L. Hutchings, "One can hardly doubt that if there had been a slower buildup of industry, the attack would have been successful and world history would have evolved quite differently." For the laborers involved in industry, however, life was difficult. Workers were encouraged to fulfill and overachieve quotas through propaganda, such as the Stakhanovite movement. Between 1933 and 1945 seven million civilians died because of the demanding labor. Between 1930 and 1940, 6 million were put through the forced labor system.
Some historians, however, interpret the lack of preparedness of the Soviet Union to defend itself as a flaw in Stalin's economic planning. David Shearer, for example, argues that there was "a command−administrative economy" but it was not "a planned one". He argues that the Soviet Union was still suffering from the Great Purge, and was completely unprepared for the Nazi German invasion. Economist Holland Hunter, in addition, argues in his Overambitious First Soviet Five−Year Plan, that an array "of alternative paths were available, evolving out of the situation existing at the end of the 1920s ... that could have been as good as those achieved by, say, 1936 yet with far less turbulence, waste, destruction and sacrifice."
In the aftermath of World War II, the Soviet Union extended its political and military influence over Eastern Europe
, in a move that was seen by some as a continuation of the older policies of the Russian Empire
. Some territories that had been lost by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
(1918) were annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II: the Baltic States
and eastern portions of interwar Poland. The Russian SFSR also gained the northern half of East Prussia (Kaliningrad Oblast
) from Germany. The Ukrainian SSR
gained Transcarpathia
(as Zakarpattia Oblast
) from Czechoslovakia
, and Ukrainian populated Northern Bukovina
(as Chernivtsi Oblast
) from Romania
. Finally, in the late 1940s, pro−Soviet Communist Parties won the elections in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia
, Hungary, Romania
and Bulgaria
) and subsequently became Stalinist dictatorships. These elections are generally regarded as rigged, and the Western powers did not recognize the elections as legitimate. For the duration of the Cold War, the countries of Eastern Europe became Soviet satellite state
s — they were "independent" nations, which were one-party Communist States whose General Secretary had to be approved by the Kremlin, and so their governments usually kept their policy in line with the wishes of the Soviet Union, although nationalistic forces and pressures within the satellite states played a part in causing some deviation from strict Soviet rule.
. Tsarist Russia, unable to compete industrially, sought to close off and colonize parts of East Asia, while Americans demanded open competition for markets.
Lasting Russian mistrust arose from the landing of U.S. troops in Soviet Russia in 1918, which became involved, directly and indirectly, in assisting the anti−Bolshevik Whites in the civil war
.
In addition, the Soviets requested that the United States and Britain open a second front on the European continent; but the Allied invasion did not occur until June 1944, more than two years later. In the meantime, the Russians suffered horrendous casualties, more than 20 million dead, and the Soviets were forced to withstand the brunt of German strength. The allies claimed that a second front had been opened in 1943 in Italy and were not prepared to immediately assault Nazi−occupied France.
to Trieste
. Aside from a few minor adjustments, this would be the "iron curtain" of the Cold War
. In hindsight, Yalta signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evinced by U.S. occupation of Japan and the division of Korea
. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the postwar status quo in which Soviet Union hegemony reigned over about one-third and the Allies over two-thirds.
The Soviets were able to use a well organized ring of spies in the United States, to gain critical advantages during meetings with representatives of Britain and the United States. Several of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisors and cabinet members regularly reported their activities to NKVD
handlers.
There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism
and socialism
. Each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters, those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life. Conflicting models of Democratic Centralism
versus Liberal Democracy
, of state planning against free enterprise, of full or partial employment, of equality versus economic freedom, were to compete for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years.
Even so, the basic structures and tensions that marked the cold war were not yet in place in 1945-1946. Despite the necessary means of the United States to advance a different vision of postwar Europe, Joseph Stalin
viewed the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as the Soviet Union's chief threats, not the United States. At the time, the prospects of an Anglo−American front against the USSR seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint. Economic advisers such as Eugen Varga
reinforced this view, predicting a postwar crisis of overproduction
in capitalist countries which would culminate by 1947–48 in another great depression. For one, Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade and not pose a threat to the Soviet Union.
Varga's analysis was partly based on trends in U.S. federal expenditures. Due to the war effort mostly, in the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30% of GDP
, up from 3% of GDP in 1929, before the Great Depression
, New Deal
, and Second World War. Thus, Stalin assumed that the Americans would need to look to the Soviet Union, to maintain the same level of exports and state expenditures.
However, there would be no postwar crisis of overproduction. And, as Varga anticipated, the U.S. maintained a roughly comparable level of government spending in the postwar era. It was just maintained in a vastly different way. In the end, the postwar U.S. government would look a lot like the wartime government, with the military establishment, along with military-security, accounting for a significant share of federal expenditures.
Things such as the light bulb and the automobile were claimed to have been invented by Russians, and art and science were subjected to rigorous censorship
. The former was only allowed to contain themes of socialist realism, and the latter was heavily influenced by the quack biologist Trofim Lysenko
, who rejected the concept of Mendelian genetics. Even the theory of relativity
was dismissed as "bourgeoise idealism". Much of this censorship was the work of Andrei Zhdanov
, known as Stalin's "ideological hatchet man", until his death from a heart attack in 1948. Stalin's personality cult reached its height in the postwar period, with his picture displayed in every school, factory, and government office, yet he rarely appeared in public. Postwar reconstruction proceeded rapidly, but as the emphasis was all on heavy industry and energy, living standards remained low, especially outside of the major cities.
In October 1952, the first postwar party congress
convened in Moscow. The Communist Party was formally renamed to the "Communist Party of the Soviet Union". Stalin spoke only briefly, and for most of the proceedings sat in silence while Nikita Khrushchev
and Georgy Malenkov
delivered the main speeches.
Terror by the secret police continued in the postwar period. Although nothing comparable to 1937 ever happened again, there were many smaller purges, including a mass purge of the Georgian party apparatus in 1951-1952. Stalin's paranoia in his last years worsened as he began to suffer from the effects of arteriosclerosis. He finally suffered a massive stroke on March 3, 1953 and died two days later.
since April 1945, was determined to shape the postwar world to America's best interest. He saw the ravaged, war-torn Europe as a place to implant the American system — capitalism, western democracy, constitutional rule — and (according to Soviet thinking) extend American hegemony throughout the world. The Soviet Union was attempting the same thing, extending its own systems as far as it could reach, and with two opposite empires struggling for hegemony, relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union quickly soured.
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact—and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective—was the United States, which moved quickly to consolidate its position. As the world's greatest industrial power, and as one of the few nations not ravaged by the war, the United States stood to gain more than any other country from opening up a global market for its exports and access to vital raw materials.
). Such a power could mould and benefit from a recovering Europe, which in turn required a healthy Germany at its center; these aims were at the center of what the Soviet Union strove to avoid as the wartime alliance broke down.
The resolve of the United States to advance a different vision of the postwar world conflicted with Soviet interests. National security had been important to Soviet foreign policy since the 1920s, when the Communist Party adopted Stalin's "socialism in one country
" and rejected Leon Trotsky
's ideas of "world revolution
". Before the war, Stalin did not attempt to push Soviet boundaries beyond their full Tsarist extent.
In this sense, the aims of the Soviet Union may not have been aggressive expansionism but rather consolidation, i.e., attempting to secure the war−torn country's western borders. Stalin, assuming that Japan and Germany could menace the Soviet Union once again by the 1960s, thus quickly imposed Moscow−dominated governments in the springboards of the Nazi onslaught: Poland, Romania
, and Bulgaria
. Much of the rest of the world, however, viewed these moves as an aggressive attempt to expand Soviet influence and communist rule.
Disagreements over postwar plans first centered on Eastern and Central Europe. Having lost more than 20 million in the war, suffered German and Nazi German invasion, and suffered tens of millions of casualties due to onslaughts from the West three times in the preceding 150 years, first with Napoleon I
, the Stalin was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war by keeping it under tight control. U.S. aims were quite different.
Winston Churchill
, an anti-Communist, condemned Stalin for cordoning off a new Russian empire with an "iron curtain
." Afterwards, Truman finally refused to give the war-torn Soviet Union "reparations" from West Germany's industrial plants, Stalin retaliated by sealing off East Germany as a Communist state.
The Soviet Union's historic lack of warm water maritime access, a perennial concern of Russian foreign policy well before the Bolshevik Revolution, was yet another area where interests diverged between East and West. Stalin pressed the Turks for improved access out of the Black Sea
through Turkey
's Dardanelles Strait, which would allow Soviet passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean
. Churchill had earlier recognized Stalin's claims, but now the British and Americans forced the Soviet Union to pull back.
Soviet leadership policies were often more measured, however: the Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Northern Iran
, at Anglo−American behest; Stalin did observe his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against government in Greece ; in Finland he accepted a friendly, non−communist government ; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia
by the end of 1945. However, a pro-Soviet government seized power in Czechoslovakia three years later.
Speech of March 1947, which declared that the United States would spend as much as $400 million in efforts to "contain
" communism.
By successfully aiding Greece in 1947
, Truman also set a precedent for the U.S. aid to anticommunist regimes worldwide, even authoritarian ones at times. U.S. foreign policy moved into alignment with State Department officer George Kennan
's argument that the Soviets had to be "contained" using "unalterable counterforce at every point", until the breakdown of Soviet power occurred.
The United States launched massive economic reconstruction efforts, first in Western Europe and then in Japan (as well as in South Korea
and Taiwan
). The Marshall Plan
began to pump $12 billion into Western Europe. The rationale was that economically stable nations were less likely to fall prey to Soviet influence, a view which was vindicated in the long run.
In response Stalin blockaded Berlin
in 1948. The city was within the Soviet zone, although subject to the control of all four major powers. The Soviets cut off all rail and road routes to West Berlin. Convinced that he could starve and freeze West Berlin
into submission, no trucks or trains were allowed entry into the city. However, this decision backfired when Truman embarked on a highly visible move that would humiliate the Soviets internationally—supplying the beleaguered city by air. Military confrontation threatened while Truman, with British help, flew supplies over East Germany into West Berlin during the 1948–49 blockade. This costly aerial supplying of West Berlin became known as the Berlin Airlift.
Truman joined eleven other nations in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the United States' first "entangling" European alliance in 170 years. Stalin replied to these moves by integrating the economies of Eastern Europe in his version of the Marshall Plan
, exploding the first Soviet atomic device
in 1949, and signing an alliance with Communist China
in February 1950. However, the Warsaw Pact
, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO, was not created until 1955, two years after Stalin's death.
U.S. officials quickly moved to expand the policy of "containment
". In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68
, they proposed to strengthen their alliance systems, quadruple defense spending, and embark on an elaborate propaganda campaign to persuade Americans to fight this costly cold war. Truman ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb; in early 1950 the U.S. embarked on its first attempt to prop up colonialism in French Indochina
in the face of mounting popular, communist−led resistance ; and the United States embarked on what the Soviets considered a blatant violation of wartime treaties: plans to form a West German army.
The immediate post−1945 period may have been the historical high point for the popularity of communist ideology. In the late 1940s Communist parties won large shares of the vote in free elections in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia
, and Finland; and won significant popular support in Asia (Vietnam
, India, and Japan) and throughout Latin America. In addition they won large support in China, Greece, and Iran
, where free elections remained absent or constrained but where Communist parties enjoyed widespread appeal.
In response, the United States sustained a massive anti-communist ideological offensive. The United States aimed to "contain" communism through both aggressive diplomacy and interventionist policies. In retrospect, this initiative appears largely successful: Washington brandished its role as the leader of the "free world
" at least as effectively as the Soviet Union brandished its position as the leader of the "progressive" and "anti−imperialist" camp.
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, who sought to reshape Soviet society with aggressive economic planning
Economic planning
Economic planning refers to any directing or planning of economic activity outside the mechanisisms of the market, in an attempt to achieve specific economic or social outcomes. Planning is an economic mechanism for resource allocation and decision-making in contrast with the market mechanism...
, in particular a sweeping collectivization of agriculture and development of industrial power. He introduced his "Westernizer" ideals to the Soviet Union by broadly and thoroughly reforming Soviet policy; such was exemplified by a period of rapid industrialization. He also promoted a secret police
Secret police
Secret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
and a mass mobilization
Mass mobilization
Mass mobilization refers to mobilization of civilian population as part of contentious politics. Mass mobilization is often used by grassroots-based social movements, including revolutionary movements, but can also become a tool of elites and the state itself...
party, which led to millions of deaths as a result of purges and collectivization efforts.
World War II, known as "The Great Patriotic War
Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...
" in the Soviet Union, devastated much of the USSR with about one out of every three World War II deaths being a citizen of the Soviet Union
World War II casualties
World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history. Over 60 million people were killed, which was over 2.5% of the world population. The tables below give a detailed country-by-country count of human losses.-Total dead:...
. After World War II, the Soviet Union's armies occupied eastern Europe, where Communist governments came to power into the Soviet bloc
Eastern bloc
The term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
, whilst in western Europe
Western Europe
Western Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
, capitalist governments were established, with the help of aid provided by the United States. The Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
developed as the USSR and the United States struggled indirectly for influence
Sphere of influence
In the field of international relations, a sphere of influence is a spatial region or conceptual division over which a state or organization has significant cultural, economic, military or political influence....
around the world.
Planning
At the 15th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet UnionCommunist Party of the Soviet Union
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
in December 1927, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
attacked the left by expelling Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
and his supporters from the party and then moving against the right by abandoning Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years , as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a...
's New Economic Policy
New Economic Policy
The New Economic Policy was an economic policy proposed by Vladimir Lenin, who called it state capitalism. Allowing some private ventures, the NEP allowed small animal businesses or smoke shops, for instance, to reopen for private profit while the state continued to control banks, foreign trade,...
which had been championed by Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Bukharin
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Russian Marxist, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of the Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , the journal Bolshevik , Izvestia , and the Great Soviet...
and Alexei Ivanovich Rykov. Warning delegates of an impending capitalist encirclement, he insisted that survival and development could only occur by pursuing the rapid development of heavy industry
Heavy industry
Heavy industry does not have a single fixed meaning as compared to light industry. It can mean production of products which are either heavy in weight or in the processes leading to their production. In general, it is a popular term used within the name of many Japanese and Korean firms, meaning...
.
The party, under Stalin's direction, established Gosplan
Gosplan
Gosplan or State Planning Committee was the committee responsible for economic planning in the Soviet Union. The word "Gosplan" is an abbreviation for Gosudarstvenniy Komitet po Planirovaniyu...
(the State Planning Commission), a state organization responsible for guiding the socialist economy towards accelerated industrialization. In April 1929 Gosplan released two drafts that began the process that would industrialize the primarily agrarian nation. This 1,700 page report became the basis of the First Five-Year Plan
First Five-Year Plan
The First Five-Year Plan, or 1st Five-Year Plan, of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a list of economic goals that was designed to strengthen the country's economy between 1928 and 1932, making the nation both militarily and industrially self-sufficient. "We are fifty or a hundred...
for National Economic Construction, or Piatiletka, calling for the doubling of Soviet capital stock between 1928 and 1933.
Shifting from Lenin's NEP, the first Five-Year Plan established central planning as the basis of economic decision-making and the stress on rapid heavy industrialization (see Economy of the Soviet Union
Economy of the Soviet Union
The economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was based on a system of state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, industrial manufacturing and centralized administrative planning...
). It began the rapid process of transforming a largely agrarian nation consisting of peasants into an industrial superpower. In effect, the initial goals were laying the foundations for future exponential economic growth
Exponential growth
Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value...
.
The new economic system put forward by the first Five-Year plan involved a complicated series of planning arrangements (see Overview of the Soviet economic planning process). The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
, iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
, and other vital resources. Despite approximately 1,000,000 deaths this process was largely successful, and caused long-term industrial growth more rapid than any country in history.
Industrialization in practice
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
output, necessary for further development of the industrial infrastructure rose from 3.3 million to 6.2 million tons per year. Coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
, the integral product fueling modern economies and Stalinist industrialization, successfully rose from 35.4 million to 64 million tons, and output of iron ore rose from 5.7 million to 19 million tons. A number of industrial complexes such as Magnitogorsk
Magnitogorsk
Magnitogorsk is a mining and industrial city in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia, located on the eastern side of the extreme southern extent of the Ural Mountains by the Ural River. Population: 418,545 ;...
and Kuznetsk
Kuznetsk
Kuznetsk is a town in Penza Oblast, Russia, located east of Penza and west of Samara and the Volga River. Population: -External links:*...
, the Moscow and Gorky
Nizhny Novgorod
Nizhny Novgorod , colloquially shortened to Nizhny, is, with the population of 1,250,615, the fifth largest city in Russia, ranking after Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg...
automobile plants, the Urals and Kramatorsk heavy machinery plants, and Kharkov, Stalingrad and Cheliabinsk tractor
Tractor
A tractor is a vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery used in agriculture or construction...
plants had been built or were under construction.
In real terms, the workers' standards of living tended to drop, rather than rise during the industrialization. Stalin's laws to "tighten work discipline" made the situation worse: e.g., a 1932 change to the RSFSR labor law code enabled firing workers who had been absent without a reason from the work place for just one day. Being fired accordingly meant losing "the right to use ration and commodity cards" as well as the "loss of the right to use an apartment″ and even blacklisted for new employment which altogether meant a threat of starving. Those measures, however, were not fully enforced, as managers often desperately needed to hire new workers. In contrast, the 1938 legislation, which introduced labor books, followed by major revisions of the labor law, were enforced. For example, being absent or even 20 minutes late were grounds for becoming fired; managers who failed to enforce these laws faced criminal prosecution. Later, the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, 26 June 1940 "On the Transfer to the Eight-Hour Working Day, the Seven-day Work Week, and on the Prohibition of Unauthorized Departure by Laborers and Office Workers from Factories and Offices″ replaced the 1938 revisions with obligatory criminal penalties for quitting a job (2–4 months imprisonment), for being late 20 minutes (6 months of probation and pay confiscation of 25 per cent), etc.
Based on these figures the Soviet government declared that Five Year Industrial Production Plan had been fulfilled by 93.7% in only four years, while parts devoted to heavy−industry part were fulfilled by 108%. Stalin in December 1932 declared the plan a success to the Central Committee, since increases in the output of coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
and iron
Iron
Iron is a chemical element with the symbol Fe and atomic number 26. It is a metal in the first transition series. It is the most common element forming the planet Earth as a whole, forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust...
would fuel future development.
During the second five−year plan (1933–37), on the basis of the huge investment during the first plan, industry expanded extremely rapidly, and nearly reached the plan. By 1937 coal output was 127 million tons, pig iron 14.5 million tons, and there had been very rapid developments in the armaments industry.
While undoubtedly marking a massive leap in industrial capacity, the first Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18−hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 1932). Due to the allocation of resources for industry along with decreasing productivity since collectivization, a famine occurred. The use of forced labor must also not be overlooked. In the construction of the industrial complexes, inmates of labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s were used as expendable resources. But conditions improved rapidly during the second plan. Throughout the 1930s, industrialization was combined with a rapid expansion of education at schools and in higher education.
From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state−guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter−revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camp
Labor camp
A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons...
s, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation. Other estimates put these figures much higher. Much like with the famines, the evidence supporting these high numbers is disputed by some historians, although this is a minority view. The peak of the repressions was during the great Purge of 1937–8, and it had the effect of greatly slowing down production in 1937.
Collectivization
1928 witnessed the turning of the Soviet economic policies towards collectivization. This year also marked the end of the NEP, which had allowed peasants to sell their surpluses on the open market. Food demand intensified, especially in main grain producing regions, with new, forced approaches implementedUral-Siberian method
The Ural-Siberian method was an extraordinary approach launched in the Soviet Union for the collection of grain from the countryside. It was introduced in Urals and Siberia, hence the name. The Ural-Siberian method was a return to the drastic policies that had characterized War Communism in the...
. Upon joining kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
es (collective farms), peasants had to give up their private plots of land and property, and the kolkhoz produce was sold to the state for a low price set by the state itself. However, the natural progress of collectivization was slow, and the November 1929 Plenum of the Central Committee
Central Committee
Central Committee was the common designation of a standing administrative body of communist parties, analogous to a board of directors, whether ruling or non-ruling in the twentieth century and of the surviving, mostly Trotskyist, states in the early twenty first. In such party organizations the...
decided to implement accelerated, forced collectivization.
Given the goals of the first Five Year Plan, the state sought increased political control of agriculture, hoping to feed the rapidly growing urban areas and to export grain, a source of foreign currency needed to import technologies necessary for heavy−industrialization.
By 1936 about 90% of Soviet agriculture was collectivized. In many cases peasants bitterly opposed this process and often slaughtered their animals rather than give them to collective farms, even though the Government only wanted the grain. Kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s, prosperous peasants, were forcibly resettled to Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
, Siberia
Siberia
Siberia is an extensive region constituting almost all of Northern Asia. Comprising the central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, it was part of the Soviet Union from its beginning, as its predecessor states, the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire, conquered it during the 16th...
and the Russian Far North (a large portion of the kulaks served at forced labor camps). However, just about anyone opposing collectivization was deemed a "kulak". The policy of liquidation of kulaks as a class, formulated by Stalin at the end of 1929, meant some executions, and much greater deportation to special settlements and sometimes to forced labor camps.
Despite the expectations, collectivization led to a catastrophic drop in farming productivity, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940. The upheaval associated with collectivization was particularly severe in Ukraine, and the heavily Ukrainian adjoining Volga regions, a fact which has led many Ukrainian scholars to argue that there was a deliberate policy of starving the Ukrainians (see Holodomor
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
for more information). The number of people who died in the famines is estimated at between three and ten million in Ukraine alone, not counting the adjoining regions of Russia. There are disputed accounts on the actual number of 'victims' as estimated by other countries. Soviet sources vary between denying the existence of the famine and estimating much smaller numbers of dead. The actual number of casualties is bitterly disputed to this day. In 1975, Abramov and Kocharli estimated that 265,800 kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
families were sent to the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
in 1930. In 1979, Roy Medvedev
Roy Medvedev
Roy Aleksandrovich Medvedev |Georgia]]) is a Russian historian renowned as the author of the dissident history of Stalinism, Let History Judge , first published in English in 1972...
used Abramov's and Kocharli's estimate to calculate that 2.5 million peasants were exiled between 1930 and 1931, but he suspected that he underestimated the total number. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union huge numbers of archival files have been opened, and it is possible to make more accurate estimates.
In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania the collectivization of agriculture was started in 1948. By terror, killings and deportations, most peasants were collectivized by 1952. Agricultural production fell dramatically to the level of Soviet agriculture in the other Soviet Republics.
Changes in Soviet society
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...
had been a problem during the time of the Tsar and even under the NEP, but it was not a major factor after the implementation of Stalin's industrialization program. The mobilization of resources to industrialize the agrarian society created a need for labor, meaning that the unemployment went virtually to zero. Unemployment was also eliminated by fixing wages, which dropped in real terms by 50% from 1928 to 1940, thus making it financially viable for the state to employ so many workers. Several ambitious projects were begun, and they supplied raw materials not only for military weapons but also for consumer goods.
The Moscow and Gorky
Nizhny Novgorod
Nizhny Novgorod , colloquially shortened to Nizhny, is, with the population of 1,250,615, the fifth largest city in Russia, ranking after Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Yekaterinburg...
automobile plants produced automobiles that the public could utilize, although not necessarily afford, and the expansion of heavy plant and steel production made production of a greater number of cars possible. Car and truck production, for example, reached 200,000 in 1931.
Because the industrial workers needed to be educated, the number of schools increased. In 1927, 7.9 million students attended 118,558 schools. This number rose to 9.7 million students and 166,275 schools by 1933. In addition, 900 specialist departments and 566 institutions were built and functioning by 1933. Literacy rates increased substantially as a result, especially in the Central Asian republics.
The Soviet people also benefited from a type of social liberalization. Women were to be given an adequate, equal education, and legally had equal rights in employment. In practice, these goals were not reached, but the efforts to achieve them and the statement of theoretical equality led to improvements in socio−economic status for women. Stalinist development also contributed to advances in health care, which was a massive improvement over the health care system under the Tsars. Stalin's policies granted the Soviet people access to free health care and education. Widespread immunization programs created the first generation free from the fear of typhus
Typhus
Epidemic typhus is a form of typhus so named because the disease often causes epidemics following wars and natural disasters...
and cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
. The occurrences of these diseases dropped to record−low numbers and infant mortality rates were reduced by many times, resulting in the life expectancy
Life expectancy
Life expectancy is the expected number of years of life remaining at a given age. It is denoted by ex, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience...
for both men and women increasing by over 20 years by the mid to late 1950s. Many of the more extreme social and political ideas that were fashionable in the '20s such as anarchism, internationalism, and the belief that the nuclear family was a bourgeois concept were abandoned. Schools began to teach a more nationalistic course with emphasis on Russian history and leaders, although always with Marxist underpinnings. Stalin also began to create a Lenin cult. It was during the '30s that Soviet society assumed the basic form it would have until the end in 1991.
Urban women under Stalin were also the first generation of women able to give birth in a hospital with access to prenatal care. Education was another area in which there was improvement after economic development. The generation born during Stalin's rule was the first near−universally literate generation. Engineers were sent abroad to learn industrial technology, and hundreds of foreign engineers were brought to Russia on contract. Transport links were also improved, as many new railways were built, although with forced labour, costing thousands of lives. Workers who exceeded their quotas, Stakhanovite
Stakhanovite
In Soviet history and iconography, a Stakhanovite follows the example of Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov, employing hard work or Taylorist efficiencies to over-achieve on the job.- History :...
s, received many incentives for their work, although many such workers were in fact "arranged" to succeed by receiving extreme help in their work, and then their achievements were used for propaganda.
Starting in the early 1930s, the Soviet government began an all-out war on organized religion in the country. Many churches and monasteries were closed and scores of clergymen were imprisoned or executed. The state propaganda machine vigorously promoted atheism and denounced religion as being an artifact of capitalist society. In 1937, Pope Pius XI decried the attacks on religion in the Soviet Union. By 1940, only a small number of churches remained open. It should be noted that the early anti-religious campaigns under Lenin were mostly directed at the Russian Orthodox Church, as it was a symbol of the czarist government. In the 1930s however, all faiths were targeted: minority Christian denominations, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism.
The Great Purges
As this process unfolded, Stalin consolidated near−absolute power using the 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov (which many suspect Stalin of having planned) as a pretext to launch the Great Purges against his suspected political and ideological opponents, most notably the old cadres and the rank and file of the Bolshevik PartyBolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
. Trotsky had already been expelled from the party in 1927, exiled to Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
in 1928 and then expelled from the USSR entirely in 1929. Stalin used the purges to politically and physically destroy his other formal rivals (and former allies) accusing Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Zinoviev
Grigory Yevseevich Zinoviev , born Ovsei-Gershon Aronovich Radomyslsky Apfelbaum , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet Communist politician...
and Lev Kamenev
Lev Kamenev
Lev Borisovich Kamenev , born Rozenfeld , was a Bolshevik revolutionary and a prominent Soviet politician. He was briefly head of state of the new republic in 1917, and from 1923-24 the acting Premier in the last year of Lenin's life....
of being behind Kirov's assassination and planning to overthrow Stalin. Ultimately, those supposedly involved in this and other conspiracies numbered in the tens of thousands with various Old Bolsheviks and senior party members blamed with conspiracy and sabotage which were used to explain industrial accidents, production shortfalls and other failures of Stalin's regime. Measures used against opposition and suspected opposition ranged from imprisonment in work camps (Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
s) to execution to assassination (of Trotsky's son Lev Sedov and likely of Sergei Kirov—Trotsky himself was to die at the hands of one of Stalin's assassins in 1940).
Several show trial
Show trial
The term show trial is a pejorative description of a type of highly public trial in which there is a strong connotation that the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the defendant. The actual trial has as its only goal to present the accusation and the verdict to the public as...
s were held in Moscow, to serve as examples for the trials that local courts were expected to carry out elsewhere in the country. There were four key trials from 1936 to 1938, The Trial of the Sixteen was the first (December 1936); then the Trial of the Seventeen (January 1937); then the trial of Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
generals, including Marshal Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Tukhachevsky
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, commander in chief of the Red Army , and one of the most prominent victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.-Early life:...
(June 1937); and finally the Trial of the Twenty One
Trial of the Twenty One
The Trial of the Twenty-One was the last of the Moscow Trials, show trials of prominent Bolsheviks, including the Old Bolsheviks. The Trial of the Twenty-One took place in Moscow in March 1938, towards the end of Stalin's Great Purge.-The Trial:...
(including Bukharin) in March 1938. See also: Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
. During these, the defendants were typically accused of things such as sabotage, spying, counter-revolution, and conspiring with Germany and Japan to invade and partition the Soviet Union. Most confessed to the charges. The initial trials in 1935-1936 were carried out by the OGPU under Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Yagoda
Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda , born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda , was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936...
. The following year, he and his associates were removed from office and arrested. They were later tried and executed in 1938-1939. The secret police were renamed the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
and control given to Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Yezhov
Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov was a senior figure in the NKVD under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. His reign is sometimes known as the "Yezhovshchina" , "the Yezhov era", a term that began to be used during the de-Stalinization campaign of the 1950s...
, known as the "Bloody Dwarf".
The "Great Purge" swept the Soviet Union in 1937. It was widely known as the "Yezhovschina", the "Reign of Yezhov". The rate of arrests was staggering. In the armed forces alone, three of five marshals were eliminated along with 90% of the generals, 80% of the colonels, and all the regional commanders, a total of more than 30,000 officers. The entire Politburo and most of the Central Committee were purged, along with foreign communists who were living in the Soviet Union, and numerous intellectuals, bureaucrats, and factory managers. The total of people imprisoned or executed during the Yezhovschina numbered about two million. By 1938, the mass purges were starting to disrupt the country's infrastructure, and Stalin began winding them down. Yezhov was gradually relieved of power. Yezhov was relieved of all powers in 1939, then tried and executed in 1940. His successor as head of the NKVD (from 1938 to 1945) was Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
, a Georgian
Georgians
The Georgians are an ethnic group that have originated in Georgia, where they constitute a majority of the population. Large Georgian communities are also present throughout Russia, European Union, United States, and South America....
friend of Stalin's. Arrests and executions continued into 1940, although nothing on the scale of the Yezhovschina ever happened again.
During this period, the practice of mass arrest
Mass arrest
A mass arrest occurs when the police apprehend large numbers of suspects at once. This sometimes occurs at illegal protests. Some mass arrests are also used in an effort combat gang activity. This is sometimes controversial, and lawsuits sometimes result...
, torture, and imprisonment or execution without trial, of anyone suspected by the secret police of opposing Stalin's regime became commonplace. By the NKVD's own count, 681,692 people were shot during 1937–38 alone, and hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were transported to Gulag work camps.
The mass terror and purges were little known to the outside world, and many western intellectuals continued to believe that the Soviets had created a successful alternative to a capitalist world that was suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. In 1936, the country adopted its first formal constitution
Constitution of the Soviet Union
There were three versions of the constitution of the Soviet Union, modeled after the 1918 Constitution established by the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic , the immediate predecessor of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics....
, which on paper at least granted freedom of speech, religion, and assembly.
In March 1939, the 18th congress of the Communist Party was held in Moscow. Most of the delegates present at the 17th congress in 1934 were gone, and Stalin was heavily praised by Litvinov and the western democracies criticized for failing to adopt the principles of "collective security" against Nazi Germany.
Foreign relations before 1941
The young Soviet Union initially struggled with foreign relations at first, being the first communist-run country in the world. The old great powers were not pleased to see the established world order rocked by an ideology claiming to be the harbinger of a world revolutionWorld revolution
World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class...
. Indeed, many had actively opposed the very establishment of Soviet rule by meddling in the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
. Slowly the international community had to accept, however, that the Soviet Union was there to stay. They could not simply ignore the new, ascending great power. By 1933, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
and Japan, along with many other countries had recognized the Soviet government and established diplomatic ties. On November 16, 1933, the United States joined the list. Thus, by the 1930s, Soviet Russia was no longer an international pariah.
Franco−Soviet relations were initially hostile because the USSR officially opposed the World War I peace settlement of 1919 that France emphatically championed. While the Soviet Union was interested in conquering territories in Eastern Europe, France was determined to protect the fledgling nations there. This led to a rosy German−Soviet relationship in the 1920s. However, Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
's foreign policy centered on a massive seizure of Eastern European and Russian lands for Germany's own ends, and when Hitler pulled out of the World Disarmament Conference
World Disarmament Conference
The Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments of 1932-34 was an effort by member states of the League of Nations, together with the U.S. and the Soviet Union, to actualize the ideology of disarmament...
in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
in 1933, the threat hit home. Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov
Maxim Litvinov
Maxim Maximovich Litvinov was a Russian revolutionary and prominent Soviet diplomat.- Early life and first exile :...
reversed Soviet policy regarding the Paris Peace Settlement, leading to a Franco−Soviet rapprochement. In May 1935, the USSR concluded pacts of mutual assistance with France and Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
; the Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...
was also instructed to form a united front
Popular Front (France)
The Popular Front was an alliance of left-wing movements, including the French Communist Party , the French Section of the Workers' International and the Radical and Socialist Party, during the interwar period...
with leftist parties against the forces of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
. The pact was undermined, however, by strong ideological hostility to the Soviet Union and the Comintern's new front in France, Poland
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
's refusal to permit the Red Army
Red Army
The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
on its soil, France's defensive military strategy, and a continuing Soviet interest in patching up relations with Germany.
The Soviet Union also supplied military aid to the Republicans
Second Spanish Republic
The Second Spanish Republic was the government of Spain between April 14 1931, and its destruction by a military rebellion, led by General Francisco Franco....
in Spain, but held back somewhat. Its support of the government also gave the Republicans a Communist taint in the eyes of anti−Bolsheviks in the UK and France, weakening the calls for Anglo−French intervention in the war.
In response to all of this the Nazi government promulgated an Anti-Comintern Pact
Anti-Comintern Pact
The Anti-Comintern Pact was an Anti-Communist pact concluded between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan on November 25, 1936 and was directed against the Communist International ....
with Japan
Empire of Japan
The Empire of Japan is the name of the state of Japan that existed from the Meiji Restoration on 3 January 1868 to the enactment of the post-World War II Constitution of...
and later Italy
Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946)
The Kingdom of Italy was a state forged in 1861 by the unification of Italy under the influence of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which was its legal predecessor state...
and various Eastern European countries (such as Hungary
Hungary between the two world wars
This article is about the history of Hungary from October 1918 to November 1940.-Hungarian Democratic Republic:On October 31, 1918, the Hungarian Democratic Republic was created by revolution that started in Budapest after the dissolution and break-up of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I...
), ostensibly to suppress Communist activity but more realistically to forge an alliance against the USSR.
When Nazi Germany entered Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union's agreement with Czechoslovakia failed to amount to anything because of Poland and Romania
Greater Romania
The Greater Romania generally refers to the territory of Romania in the years between the First World War and the Second World War, the largest geographical extent of Romania up to that time and its largest peacetime extent ever ; more precisely, it refers to the territory of the Kingdom of...
's refusals to permit a Soviet intervention. On April 17, 1939, Stalin suggested a revived military alliance with the UK and France. The Anglo−French military mission sent in August, however, failed to impress Soviet officials; it was sent by a slow ocean−going ship and consisted of low−ranking officers who gave only vague details about their militaries. Stalin favoured Germany.
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
, a non−aggression pact with Nazi Germany on August 23, along with the German-Soviet Commercial Agreement
German-Soviet Commercial Agreement
The German–Soviet Credit Agreement was an economic arrangement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany whereby Soviet Union received an acceptance credit of 200 million Reichsmark. over 7 years with an affective interest rate of 4.5 percent...
to open economic relations. A secret appendix to the pact gave Eastern Poland, Latvia
Latvia
Latvia , officially the Republic of Latvia , is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by Estonia , to the south by Lithuania , to the east by the Russian Federation , to the southeast by Belarus and shares maritime borders to the west with Sweden...
, Estonia
Estonia
Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...
, Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
and Finland to the USSR, and Western Poland and Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
to Nazi Germany. This reflected the Soviet desire of territorial gains.
Propaganda was also considered an important foreign relations tool. International exhibitions, the distribution of media such as films and journals like USSR in Construction
USSR in Construction
USSR in Construction was a propaganda journal published in the decade of 1930 to 1941, as well as briefly in 1949, in the Soviet Union. It became an artistic gem and counter-current in the first year of socialist realism. Its pages offered some of the greatest examples of early 20th-century...
, as well as inviting prominent foreign individuals to tour the Soviet Union, were used as a method of gaining international influence.
The start of World War II
Germany invaded PolandInvasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...
on September 1; the USSR followed
Soviet invasion of Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland can refer to:* the second phase of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 when Soviet armies marched on Warsaw, Poland* Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939 when Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany attacked Second Polish Republic...
on September 17. The Soviets quelled opposition by executions and by arresting thousands. They sent hundreds of thousands to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR. Estimates varying from the accepted figure over 1.5 million. to the most conservative figures using recently found NKVD documents showing 309,000 to 381,220. in four major waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941. (See Soviet invasion of Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland can refer to:* the second phase of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 when Soviet armies marched on Warsaw, Poland* Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939 when Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany attacked Second Polish Republic...
.)
With Poland being divided between two powers, the Soviet Union put forth its territorial demands to Finland for a minor part of the Karelian Isthmus
Karelian Isthmus
The Karelian Isthmus is the approximately 45–110 km wide stretch of land, situated between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, to the north of the River Neva . Its northwestern boundary is the relatively narrow area between the Bay of Vyborg and Lake Ladoga...
, a naval base at Hanko
Hanko, Finland
Hanko , is a bilingual port town and municipality on the south coast of Finland, west of Helsinki. Its current population is , with a majority being Finnish speakers and a strong minority being Swedish speakers.-Politics:...
(Hangö) peninsula and some islands in the Gulf of Finland
Gulf of Finland
The Gulf of Finland is the easternmost arm of the Baltic Sea. It extends between Finland and Estonia all the way to Saint Petersburg in Russia, where the river Neva drains into it. Other major cities around the gulf include Helsinki and Tallinn...
. Finland rejected the demands and on November 30, the Soviet Union invaded Finland, thus triggering the Winter War
Winter War
The Winter War was a military conflict between the Soviet Union and Finland. It began with a Soviet offensive on 30 November 1939 – three months after the start of World War II and the Soviet invasion of Poland – and ended on 13 March 1940 with the Moscow Peace Treaty...
. Despite outnumbering Finnish troops by over 2.5:1, the war proved embarrassingly difficult for the Red Army, which was ill-equipped for the winter weather and lacking competent commanders since the purge of the Soviet high command. The Finns resisted fiercely, and received considerable support and sympathy from the Allies. But in the spring of 1940, the snows melted, and a renewed Soviet offensive compelled them to surrender and relinquish the Karelia Isthmus and some smaller territories.
In 1940, the USSR occupied and annexed Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. On June 14, 1941, the USSR performed first mass deportations from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. (See Occupation of Baltic Republics
Occupation of Baltic Republics
The occupation of the Baltic states refers to the military occupation of the three Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania by the Soviet Union under the auspices of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 14 June 1940 followed by their incorporation into the USSR as constituent republics, unrecognised...
.)
On June 26, 1940 the Soviet government issued an ultimatum to the Romanian minister in Moscow, demanding Romania immediately cede Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Italy and Germany, which needed a stable Romania and access to its oil fields urged King Carol II
Carol II of Romania
Carol II reigned as King of Romania from 8 June 1930 until 6 September 1940. Eldest son of Ferdinand, King of Romania, and his wife, Queen Marie, a daughter of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second eldest son of Queen Victoria...
to do so. Under duress, with no prospect of aid from France or Britain, Carol complied. On June 28, Soviet troops crossed the Dniester and occupied Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....
, Northern Bukovina, and the Herta region. (See Soviet occupation of Bessarabia.)
The Great Patriotic War
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
abruptly broke the non−aggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
. Soviet intelligence was fooled by German disinformation and sent to Moscow false alarms about German invasion in April, May and beginning of June. Despite the popular myth there was no warning "Germany will attack on 22 June without declaration of war", moreover, Soviet intelligence reported that Germany would either invade the USSR after fall of the British Empire or after an unacceptable ultimatum demanding German occupation of Ukraine during the German invasion of Britain.
Like in Sino-Soviet conflict
Sino-Soviet conflict (1929)
The Sino–Soviet conflict of 1929 was a minor armed conflict between the Soviet Union and Chinese warlord Zhang Xueliang of the Republic of China over the Manchurian Chinese Eastern Railway....
on Chinese Eastern Railway or Soviet-Japanese border conflicts
Soviet-Japanese Border Wars
The Soviet–Japanese Border Wars were a series of border conflicts between the Soviet Union and Japan between 1932 and 1939.Before Japanese occupation of Manchukuo, the Soviet Union had conflict with China on the border of Manchuria...
Soviet troops on western border received a directive undersigned by Marshal
Marshal
Marshal , is a word used in several official titles of various branches of society. The word is an ancient loan word from Old French, cf...
Semyon Timoshenko
Semyon Timoshenko
Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko was a Soviet military commander and senior professional officer of the Red Army at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.-Early life:...
and General of the Army
General of the Army
General of the Army is a military rank used in some countries to denote a senior military leader, usually a General in command of a nation's Army. It may also be the title given to a General who commands an Army in the field....
Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov , was a Russian career officer in the Red Army who, in the course of World War II, played a pivotal role in leading the Red Army through much of Eastern Europe to liberate the Soviet Union and other nations from the Axis Powers' occupation...
that ordered (as demanded by Stalin): "do not answer to any provocations" and "do not undertake any (offensive) actions without specific orders" - which meant that Soviet troops could open fire only on their soil and forbade counter-attack on German soil.
And so, the Nazi invasion caught the Soviet military unprepared. In the larger sense, Stalin expected invasion but not so soon. The Army had been decimated by the Purges; time was needed for a recovery of competence. As such, mobilization did not occur and the Soviet Army was unprepared in that tactical sense, when the invasion occurred. The initial weeks of the war were a disaster, with tens of thousands of men being killed, wounded, or captured. Whole divisions disintegrated against the German onslaught.
It is said that Stalin, at first, refused to believe Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
had broken the treaty. However, new evidence shows Stalin held meetings with a variety of senior Soviet government and military figures, including Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Molotov
Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov was a Soviet politician and diplomat, an Old Bolshevik and a leading figure in the Soviet government from the 1920s, when he rose to power as a protégé of Joseph Stalin, to 1957, when he was dismissed from the Presidium of the Central Committee by Nikita Khrushchev...
(People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs), Semyon Timoshenko
Semyon Timoshenko
Semyon Konstantinovich Timoshenko was a Soviet military commander and senior professional officer of the Red Army at the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.-Early life:...
(People's Commissar for Defense), Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov , was a Russian career officer in the Red Army who, in the course of World War II, played a pivotal role in leading the Red Army through much of Eastern Europe to liberate the Soviet Union and other nations from the Axis Powers' occupation...
(Chief of Staff of the Red Army), Nikolai Kuznetsov
Nikolai Gerasimovich Kuznetsov
Nikolay Gerasimovich Kuznetsov was a Soviet naval officer who achieved the rank of Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union and served as People's Commissar of the Navy during The Second World War....
(Commander of both North Caucasus and Baltic Military Districts), and Boris Shaposhnikov
Boris Shaposhnikov
Boris Mikhailovitch Shaposhnikov was a Soviet military commander.-Biography:Shaposhnikov was born at Zlatoust, near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. He joined the army of the Russian Empire in 1901 and graduated from the Nicholas General Staff Academy in 1910, reaching the rank of colonel in the...
(Deputy People's Commissar for Defense). All in all, on the very first day of the attack, Stalin held meetings with over 15 individual members of the Soviet government and military apparatus.
German troops reached the outskirts of Moscow in December 1941, but failed to capture it, due to staunch Soviet defence and counterattacks. At the Battle of Stalingrad
Battle of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad was a major battle of World War II in which Nazi Germany and its allies fought the Soviet Union for control of the city of Stalingrad in southwestern Russia. The battle took place between 23 August 1942 and 2 February 1943...
in 1942–43the Red Army inflicted a crushing defeat on the German army. Due to the unwillingness of the Japanese to open a second front in Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
, the Soviets were able to call dozens of Red Army divisions back from eastern Russia. These units were instrumental in turning the tide, because most of their officer corps had escaped Stalin's purges. The Soviet forces soon launched massive counter attacks along the entire German line. By 1944, the Germans had been pushed out of the Soviet Union onto the banks of the Vistula River, just east of Prussia. With Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov
Georgy Zhukov
Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Konstantinovich Zhukov , was a Russian career officer in the Red Army who, in the course of World War II, played a pivotal role in leading the Red Army through much of Eastern Europe to liberate the Soviet Union and other nations from the Axis Powers' occupation...
attacking from Prussia, and Marshal Konev slicing Germany in half from the south the fate of Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
was sealed. On May 2, 1945 the last German troops surrendered to the overjoyed Soviet troops in Berlin.
Wartime developments
From the end of 1944 to 1949, large sections of eastern Germany came under the Soviet Union's occupation and on 2 May 1945, the capital city Berlin was taken, while over fifteen million Germans were removed from eastern Germany and pushed into central Germany (later called German Democratic RepublicGerman Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...
) and western Germany (later called Federal Republic of Germany). Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czech, etc., were then moved onto German land.
An atmosphere of patriotic emergency took over the Soviet Union during the war, and persecution of the Orthodox Church was halted. The Church was now permitted to operate with a fair degree of freedom, so long as it did not get involved in politics. In 1944, a new Soviet national anthem was written, replacing the Internationale, which had been used as the national anthem since 1918. These changes were made because it was thought that the people would respond better to a fight for their country than for a political ideology.
The Soviets bore the brunt of World War II because the West did not open up a second ground front in Europe until the invasion of Italy and the Battle of Normandy
Operation Overlord
Operation Overlord was the code name for the Battle of Normandy, the operation that launched the invasion of German-occupied western Europe during World War II by Allied forces. The operation commenced on 6 June 1944 with the Normandy landings...
. Approximately 26.6 million Soviets, among them 18 million civilians, were killed in the war. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis. The retreating Soviet army was ordered to pursue a 'scorched earth
Scorched earth
A scorched earth policy is a military strategy or operational method which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through or withdrawing from an area...
' policy whereby retreating Soviet troops were ordered to destroy civilian infrastructure and food supplies so that the Nazi German troops could not use them.
Stalin's original declaration in March 1946 that there were 7 million war dead was revised in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
with a round number of 20 million. In the late 1980s, demographers in the State Statistics Committee (Goskomstat
Goskomstat
Goskomstat was the centralised agency dealing with statistics in the Soviet Union. Goskomstat was created in 1987 to replace the Central Statistical Administration. While maintaining the same basic functions in the collection, analysis, and publicationand distribution of state statistics,...
) took another look using demographic methods and came up with an estimate of 26–27 million. A variety of other estimates have been made. In most detailed estimates roughly two-thirds of the estimated deaths were civilian losses. However, the breakdown of war losses by nationality is less well known. One study, relying on indirect evidence from the 1959 population census, found that while in terms of the aggregate human losses the major Slavic groups suffered most, the largest losses relative to population size were incurred by minority nationalities mainly from European Russia, among groups from which men were mustered to the front in "nationality battalions" and appear to have suffered disproportionately.
After the war, the Soviet Union occupied and dominated Eastern Europe, in line with their particular Marxist ideology.
Stalin was determined to punish those peoples he saw as collaborating with Germany during the war and to deal with the problem of nationalism, which would tend to pull the Soviet Union apart. Millions of Poles, Latvians, Georgians, Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities were deported to Gulags in Siberia. (Previously, following the 1939 annexation of eastern Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland can refer to:* the second phase of the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 when Soviet armies marched on Warsaw, Poland* Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939 when Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany attacked Second Polish Republic...
, thousands of Polish Army officers, including reservists, had been executed in the spring of 1940, in what came to be known as the Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre , was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of...
.) In addition, in 1941, 1943 and 1944 several whole nationalities had been deported to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Central Asia, including, among others, the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush
Ingush
Ingush may refer to:* The Ingush language* The Ingush people, an ethnic group of the North Caucasus...
, Balkars
Balkars
The Balkars are a Turkic people of the Caucasus region, one of the titular populations of Kabardino-Balkaria. They are possibly Bulgars or are descended from them...
, Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic ethnic group that originally resided in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language...
, and Meskhetian Turks. Though these groups were later politically "rehabilitated", some were never given back their former autonomous regions.
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The Soviet Union was especially devastated due to the mass destruction of the industrial base that it had built up in the 1930s. The USSR also experienced a major famine in 1946–48 due to war devastation that cost an estimated 1 to 1.5 million lives as well as secondary population losses due to reduced fertility. However, the Soviet Union recovered its production capabilities and overcame pre−war capabilities, becoming the country with the most powerful land army in history by the end of the war, and having the most powerful military production capabilities.
War and Stalinist industrial−military development
Although the Soviet Union received aid and weapons from the United States under the lend-leaseLend-Lease
Lend-Lease was the program under which the United States of America supplied the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, Free France, and other Allied nations with materiel between 1941 and 1945. It was signed into law on March 11, 1941, a year and a half after the outbreak of war in Europe in...
program, the Soviet production of war materials was greater than that of Nazi Germany because of rapid growth of Soviet industrial production during the interwar years (additional supplies from lend−lease accounted for about 10–12% of the Soviet Union's own industrial output). The Second Five Year Plan raised steel
Steel
Steel is an alloy that consists mostly of iron and has a carbon content between 0.2% and 2.1% by weight, depending on the grade. Carbon is the most common alloying material for iron, but various other alloying elements are used, such as manganese, chromium, vanadium, and tungsten...
production to 18 million tons and coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...
to 128 million tons. Before it was interrupted, the Third Five Year Plan produced no less than 19 million tons of steel and 150 million tons of coal.
The Soviet Union's industrial output provided an armaments industry which supported their army, helping it resist the Nazi military offensive. According to Robert L. Hutchings, "One can hardly doubt that if there had been a slower buildup of industry, the attack would have been successful and world history would have evolved quite differently." For the laborers involved in industry, however, life was difficult. Workers were encouraged to fulfill and overachieve quotas through propaganda, such as the Stakhanovite movement. Between 1933 and 1945 seven million civilians died because of the demanding labor. Between 1930 and 1940, 6 million were put through the forced labor system.
Some historians, however, interpret the lack of preparedness of the Soviet Union to defend itself as a flaw in Stalin's economic planning. David Shearer, for example, argues that there was "a command−administrative economy" but it was not "a planned one". He argues that the Soviet Union was still suffering from the Great Purge, and was completely unprepared for the Nazi German invasion. Economist Holland Hunter, in addition, argues in his Overambitious First Soviet Five−Year Plan, that an array "of alternative paths were available, evolving out of the situation existing at the end of the 1920s ... that could have been as good as those achieved by, say, 1936 yet with far less turbulence, waste, destruction and sacrifice."
Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...
, in a move that was seen by some as a continuation of the older policies of the Russian Empire
Russian Empire
The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
. Some territories that had been lost by Soviet Russia in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, mediated by South African Andrik Fuller, at Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers, headed by Germany, marking Russia's exit from World War I.While the treaty was practically obsolete before the end of the year,...
(1918) were annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II: the Baltic States
Baltic states
The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
and eastern portions of interwar Poland. The Russian SFSR also gained the northern half of East Prussia (Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast is a federal subject of Russia situated on the Baltic coast. It has a population of The oblast forms the westernmost part of the Russian Federation, but it has no land connection to the rest of Russia. Since its creation it has been an exclave of the Russian SFSR and then the...
) from Germany. The Ukrainian SSR
Ukrainian SSR
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR was a sovereign Soviet Socialist state and one of the fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union lasting from its inception in 1922 to the breakup in 1991...
gained Transcarpathia
Carpathian Ruthenia
Carpathian Ruthenia is a region in Eastern Europe, mostly located in western Ukraine's Zakarpattia Oblast , with smaller parts in easternmost Slovakia , Poland's Lemkovyna and Romanian Maramureş.It is...
(as Zakarpattia Oblast
Zakarpattia Oblast
The Zakarpattia Oblast is an administrative oblast located in southwestern Ukraine. Its administrative center is the city of Uzhhorod...
) from Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, and Ukrainian populated Northern Bukovina
Bukovina
Bukovina is a historical region on the northern slopes of the northeastern Carpathian Mountains and the adjoining plains.-Name:The name Bukovina came into official use in 1775 with the region's annexation from the Principality of Moldavia to the possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy, which became...
(as Chernivtsi Oblast
Chernivtsi Oblast
Chernivtsi Oblast is an oblast in western Ukraine, bordering on Romania and Moldova. It has a large variety of landforms: the Carpathian Mountains and picturesque hills at the foot of the mountains gradually change to a broad partly forested plain situated between the Dniester and Prut rivers....
) from Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
. Finally, in the late 1940s, pro−Soviet Communist Parties won the elections in five countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, Hungary, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
and Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
) and subsequently became Stalinist dictatorships. These elections are generally regarded as rigged, and the Western powers did not recognize the elections as legitimate. For the duration of the Cold War, the countries of Eastern Europe became Soviet satellite state
Satellite state
A satellite state is a political term that refers to a country that is formally independent, but under heavy political and economic influence or control by another country...
s — they were "independent" nations, which were one-party Communist States whose General Secretary had to be approved by the Kremlin, and so their governments usually kept their policy in line with the wishes of the Soviet Union, although nationalistic forces and pressures within the satellite states played a part in causing some deviation from strict Soviet rule.
The tenor of Soviet−U.S. relations
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union was an aberration from the normal tenor of Russian−U.S. relations. Strategic rivalry between the huge, sprawling nations goes back to the 1890s when, after a century of friendship, Americans and Russians became rivals over the development of ManchuriaManchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
. Tsarist Russia, unable to compete industrially, sought to close off and colonize parts of East Asia, while Americans demanded open competition for markets.
Lasting Russian mistrust arose from the landing of U.S. troops in Soviet Russia in 1918, which became involved, directly and indirectly, in assisting the anti−Bolshevik Whites in the civil war
Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War
The Allied intervention was a multi-national military expedition launched in 1918 during World War I which continued into the Russian Civil War. Its operations included forces from 14 nations and were conducted over a vast territory...
.
In addition, the Soviets requested that the United States and Britain open a second front on the European continent; but the Allied invasion did not occur until June 1944, more than two years later. In the meantime, the Russians suffered horrendous casualties, more than 20 million dead, and the Soviets were forced to withstand the brunt of German strength. The allies claimed that a second front had been opened in 1943 in Italy and were not prepared to immediately assault Nazi−occupied France.
The breakdown of postwar peace
When the war ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, Soviet and Western (US, British, and French) troops were essentially facing each other along a line down the center of Europe ranging from LübeckLübeck
The Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second-largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and, because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage, is listed by UNESCO as a World...
to Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
. Aside from a few minor adjustments, this would be the "iron curtain" of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
. In hindsight, Yalta signified the agreement of both sides that they could stay there and that neither side would use force to push the other out. This tacit accord applied to Asia as well, as evinced by U.S. occupation of Japan and the division of Korea
Division of Korea
The division of Korea into North Korea and South Korea stems from the 1945 Allied victory in World War II, ending Japan's 35-year colonial rule of Korea. In a proposal opposed by nearly all Koreans, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to temporarily occupy the country as a trusteeship...
. Politically, therefore, Yalta was an agreement on the postwar status quo in which Soviet Union hegemony reigned over about one-third and the Allies over two-thirds.
The Soviets were able to use a well organized ring of spies in the United States, to gain critical advantages during meetings with representatives of Britain and the United States. Several of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisors and cabinet members regularly reported their activities to NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
handlers.
There were fundamental contrasts between the visions of the United States and the Soviet Union, between capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
and socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
. Each vindicated in 1945 by previous disasters, those contrasts had been simplified and refined in national ideologies to represent two ways of life. Conflicting models of Democratic Centralism
Democratic centralism
Democratic centralism is the name given to the principles of internal organization used by Leninist political parties, and the term is sometimes used as a synonym for any Leninist policy inside a political party...
versus Liberal Democracy
Liberal democracy
Liberal democracy, also known as constitutional democracy, is a common form of representative democracy. According to the principles of liberal democracy, elections should be free and fair, and the political process should be competitive...
, of state planning against free enterprise, of full or partial employment, of equality versus economic freedom, were to compete for the allegiance of the developing and developed world in the postwar years.
Even so, the basic structures and tensions that marked the cold war were not yet in place in 1945-1946. Despite the necessary means of the United States to advance a different vision of postwar Europe, Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
viewed the re-emergence of Germany and Japan as the Soviet Union's chief threats, not the United States. At the time, the prospects of an Anglo−American front against the USSR seemed slim from Stalin's standpoint. Economic advisers such as Eugen Varga
Eugen Varga
Eugen Samuilovich Varga was a Marxist economist of Hungarian origin.He studied philosophy and economic geography at the University of Budapest. In 1906, he started writing in socialist and academic journals, mainly on economic subjects, but also on other topics...
reinforced this view, predicting a postwar crisis of overproduction
Overproduction
In economics, overproduction, oversupply or excess of supply refers to excess of supply over demand of products being offered to the market...
in capitalist countries which would culminate by 1947–48 in another great depression. For one, Stalin assumed that the capitalist camp would soon resume its internal rivalry over colonies and trade and not pose a threat to the Soviet Union.
Varga's analysis was partly based on trends in U.S. federal expenditures. Due to the war effort mostly, in the first peacetime year of 1946, federal spending still amounted to $62 billion, or 30% of GDP
Gross domestic product
Gross domestic product refers to the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period. GDP per capita is often considered an indicator of a country's standard of living....
, up from 3% of GDP in 1929, before the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
, and Second World War. Thus, Stalin assumed that the Americans would need to look to the Soviet Union, to maintain the same level of exports and state expenditures.
However, there would be no postwar crisis of overproduction. And, as Varga anticipated, the U.S. maintained a roughly comparable level of government spending in the postwar era. It was just maintained in a vastly different way. In the end, the postwar U.S. government would look a lot like the wartime government, with the military establishment, along with military-security, accounting for a significant share of federal expenditures.
Domestic events
The mild political liberalization that took place in the Soviet Union during the war quickly came to an end in 1945. The Orthodox Church was generally left unmolested after the war and was even allowed to print small amounts of religious literature, but persecution of minority religions was resumed. Stalin and the Communist Party were given full credit for the victory over Germany, and generals such as Zhukov were demoted to regional commands (the Ukraine in his case). With the onset of the Cold War, anti-Western propaganda was stepped up, with the capitalist world depicted as a decadent place where crime, unemployment, and poverty were rampant.Things such as the light bulb and the automobile were claimed to have been invented by Russians, and art and science were subjected to rigorous censorship
Censorship in the Soviet Union
Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced.Censorship was performed in two main directions:*State secrets were handled by Main Administration for Safeguarding State Secrets in the Press was in charge of censoring all publications and broadcasting for state...
. The former was only allowed to contain themes of socialist realism, and the latter was heavily influenced by the quack biologist Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist of Ukrainian origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful...
, who rejected the concept of Mendelian genetics. Even the theory of relativity
Theory of relativity
The theory of relativity, or simply relativity, encompasses two theories of Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity. However, the word relativity is sometimes used in reference to Galilean invariance....
was dismissed as "bourgeoise idealism". Much of this censorship was the work of Andrei Zhdanov
Andrei Zhdanov
Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov was a Soviet politician.-Life:Zhdanov enlisted with the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1915 and was promoted through the party ranks, becoming the All-Union Communist Party manager in Leningrad after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934...
, known as Stalin's "ideological hatchet man", until his death from a heart attack in 1948. Stalin's personality cult reached its height in the postwar period, with his picture displayed in every school, factory, and government office, yet he rarely appeared in public. Postwar reconstruction proceeded rapidly, but as the emphasis was all on heavy industry and energy, living standards remained low, especially outside of the major cities.
In October 1952, the first postwar party congress
19th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
The Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was held from October 5–14, 1952. It was the last congress of the Stalin regime and the first to take place since before World War II...
convened in Moscow. The Communist Party was formally renamed to the "Communist Party of the Soviet Union". Stalin spoke only briefly, and for most of the proceedings sat in silence while Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
and Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Malenkov
Georgy Maximilianovich Malenkov was a Soviet politician, Communist Party leader and close collaborator of Joseph Stalin. After Stalin's death, he became Premier of the Soviet Union and was in 1953 briefly considered the most powerful Soviet politician before being overshadowed by Nikita...
delivered the main speeches.
Terror by the secret police continued in the postwar period. Although nothing comparable to 1937 ever happened again, there were many smaller purges, including a mass purge of the Georgian party apparatus in 1951-1952. Stalin's paranoia in his last years worsened as he began to suffer from the effects of arteriosclerosis. He finally suffered a massive stroke on March 3, 1953 and died two days later.
Two visions of the world
The United States, however, led by President Harry S. TrumanHarry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
since April 1945, was determined to shape the postwar world to America's best interest. He saw the ravaged, war-torn Europe as a place to implant the American system — capitalism, western democracy, constitutional rule — and (according to Soviet thinking) extend American hegemony throughout the world. The Soviet Union was attempting the same thing, extending its own systems as far as it could reach, and with two opposite empires struggling for hegemony, relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union quickly soured.
World War II resulted in enormous destruction of infrastructure and populations throughout Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans, with almost no country left unscathed. The only major industrial power in the world to emerge intact—and even greatly strengthened from an economic perspective—was the United States, which moved quickly to consolidate its position. As the world's greatest industrial power, and as one of the few nations not ravaged by the war, the United States stood to gain more than any other country from opening up a global market for its exports and access to vital raw materials.
The beginning of the Cold War
Truman could advance these principles with an economic powerhouse that produced 50% of the world's industrial goods and a vast military power that rested on a monopoly of the new atomic bomb (see also Soviet atomic bomb projectSoviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb , was a clandestine research and development program began during and post-World War II, in the wake of the Soviet Union's discovery of the United States' nuclear project...
). Such a power could mould and benefit from a recovering Europe, which in turn required a healthy Germany at its center; these aims were at the center of what the Soviet Union strove to avoid as the wartime alliance broke down.
The resolve of the United States to advance a different vision of the postwar world conflicted with Soviet interests. National security had been important to Soviet foreign policy since the 1920s, when the Communist Party adopted Stalin's "socialism in one country
Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin in 1924, elaborated by Nikolai Bukharin in 1925 and finally adopted as state policy by Stalin...
" and rejected Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky
Leon Trotsky , born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army....
's ideas of "world revolution
World revolution
World revolution is the Marxist concept of overthrowing capitalism in all countries through the conscious revolutionary action of the organized working class...
". Before the war, Stalin did not attempt to push Soviet boundaries beyond their full Tsarist extent.
In this sense, the aims of the Soviet Union may not have been aggressive expansionism but rather consolidation, i.e., attempting to secure the war−torn country's western borders. Stalin, assuming that Japan and Germany could menace the Soviet Union once again by the 1960s, thus quickly imposed Moscow−dominated governments in the springboards of the Nazi onslaught: Poland, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
, and Bulgaria
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
. Much of the rest of the world, however, viewed these moves as an aggressive attempt to expand Soviet influence and communist rule.
Disagreements over postwar plans first centered on Eastern and Central Europe. Having lost more than 20 million in the war, suffered German and Nazi German invasion, and suffered tens of millions of casualties due to onslaughts from the West three times in the preceding 150 years, first with Napoleon I
Napoleon I
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...
, the Stalin was determined to destroy Germany's capacity for another war by keeping it under tight control. U.S. aims were quite different.
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, was a predominantly Conservative British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century and served as Prime Minister twice...
, an anti-Communist, condemned Stalin for cordoning off a new Russian empire with an "iron curtain
Iron Curtain
The concept of the Iron Curtain symbolized the ideological fighting and physical boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1989...
." Afterwards, Truman finally refused to give the war-torn Soviet Union "reparations" from West Germany's industrial plants, Stalin retaliated by sealing off East Germany as a Communist state.
The Soviet Union's historic lack of warm water maritime access, a perennial concern of Russian foreign policy well before the Bolshevik Revolution, was yet another area where interests diverged between East and West. Stalin pressed the Turks for improved access out of the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
through Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
's Dardanelles Strait, which would allow Soviet passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
. Churchill had earlier recognized Stalin's claims, but now the British and Americans forced the Soviet Union to pull back.
Soviet leadership policies were often more measured, however: the Soviet Union eventually withdrew from Northern Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, at Anglo−American behest; Stalin did observe his 1944 agreement with Churchill and did not aid the communists in the struggle against government in Greece ; in Finland he accepted a friendly, non−communist government ; and Russian troops were withdrawn from Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
by the end of 1945. However, a pro-Soviet government seized power in Czechoslovakia three years later.
"Containment" and the Marshall Plan
An Anglo−American effort was made to support the Greek government in order to protect the free peoples against totalitarian regimes. This was articulated in the Truman DoctrineTruman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was a policy set forth by U.S. President Harry S Truman in a speech on March 12, 1947 stating that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere...
Speech of March 1947, which declared that the United States would spend as much as $400 million in efforts to "contain
Containment
Containment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
" communism.
By successfully aiding Greece in 1947
Truman Doctrine
The Truman Doctrine was a policy set forth by U.S. President Harry S Truman in a speech on March 12, 1947 stating that the U.S. would support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet sphere...
, Truman also set a precedent for the U.S. aid to anticommunist regimes worldwide, even authoritarian ones at times. U.S. foreign policy moved into alignment with State Department officer George Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War...
's argument that the Soviets had to be "contained" using "unalterable counterforce at every point", until the breakdown of Soviet power occurred.
The United States launched massive economic reconstruction efforts, first in Western Europe and then in Japan (as well as in South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
and Taiwan
Taiwan
Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
). The Marshall Plan
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was the large-scale American program to aid Europe where the United States gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to combat the spread of Soviet communism. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948...
began to pump $12 billion into Western Europe. The rationale was that economically stable nations were less likely to fall prey to Soviet influence, a view which was vindicated in the long run.
In response Stalin blockaded Berlin
Berlin Blockade
The Berlin Blockade was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War and the first resulting in casualties. During the multinational occupation of post-World War II Germany, the Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway and road access to the sectors of Berlin under Allied...
in 1948. The city was within the Soviet zone, although subject to the control of all four major powers. The Soviets cut off all rail and road routes to West Berlin. Convinced that he could starve and freeze West Berlin
West Berlin
West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...
into submission, no trucks or trains were allowed entry into the city. However, this decision backfired when Truman embarked on a highly visible move that would humiliate the Soviets internationally—supplying the beleaguered city by air. Military confrontation threatened while Truman, with British help, flew supplies over East Germany into West Berlin during the 1948–49 blockade. This costly aerial supplying of West Berlin became known as the Berlin Airlift.
Truman joined eleven other nations in 1949 to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the United States' first "entangling" European alliance in 170 years. Stalin replied to these moves by integrating the economies of Eastern Europe in his version of the Marshall Plan
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was the large-scale American program to aid Europe where the United States gave monetary support to help rebuild European economies after the end of World War II in order to combat the spread of Soviet communism. The plan was in operation for four years beginning in April 1948...
, exploding the first Soviet atomic device
Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb , was a clandestine research and development program began during and post-World War II, in the wake of the Soviet Union's discovery of the United States' nuclear project...
in 1949, and signing an alliance with Communist China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
in February 1950. However, the Warsaw Pact
Warsaw Pact
The Warsaw Treaty Organization of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance , or more commonly referred to as the Warsaw Pact, was a mutual defense treaty subscribed to by eight communist states in Eastern Europe...
, Eastern Europe's counterpart to NATO, was not created until 1955, two years after Stalin's death.
U.S. officials quickly moved to expand the policy of "containment
Containment
Containment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
". In a secret 1950 document, NSC-68
NSC-68
National Security Council Report 68 was a 58-page formerly-classified report issued by the United States National Security Council on April 14, 1950, during the presidency of Harry S. Truman. Written during the formative stage of the Cold War, it was top secret until the 1970s when it was made...
, they proposed to strengthen their alliance systems, quadruple defense spending, and embark on an elaborate propaganda campaign to persuade Americans to fight this costly cold war. Truman ordered the development of a hydrogen bomb; in early 1950 the U.S. embarked on its first attempt to prop up colonialism in French Indochina
French Indochina
French Indochina was part of the French colonial empire in southeast Asia. A federation of the three Vietnamese regions, Tonkin , Annam , and Cochinchina , as well as Cambodia, was formed in 1887....
in the face of mounting popular, communist−led resistance ; and the United States embarked on what the Soviets considered a blatant violation of wartime treaties: plans to form a West German army.
The immediate post−1945 period may have been the historical high point for the popularity of communist ideology. In the late 1940s Communist parties won large shares of the vote in free elections in countries such as Belgium, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
, and Finland; and won significant popular support in Asia (Vietnam
Vietnam
Vietnam – sometimes spelled Viet Nam , officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam – is the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia. It is bordered by China to the north, Laos to the northwest, Cambodia to the southwest, and the South China Sea –...
, India, and Japan) and throughout Latin America. In addition they won large support in China, Greece, and Iran
Iran
Iran , officially the Islamic Republic of Iran , is a country in Southern and Western Asia. The name "Iran" has been in use natively since the Sassanian era and came into use internationally in 1935, before which the country was known to the Western world as Persia...
, where free elections remained absent or constrained but where Communist parties enjoyed widespread appeal.
In response, the United States sustained a massive anti-communist ideological offensive. The United States aimed to "contain" communism through both aggressive diplomacy and interventionist policies. In retrospect, this initiative appears largely successful: Washington brandished its role as the leader of the "free world
Free World
The Free World is a Cold War-era term often used to describe states not under the rule of the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies, China, Vietnam, Cuba, and other communist nations. The term often referred to states such as the United States, Canada, and Western European states such as the...
" at least as effectively as the Soviet Union brandished its position as the leader of the "progressive" and "anti−imperialist" camp.
Korean War
In 1950 the Soviet Union protested against the fact that the Chinese seat at the UN Security Council was held by the (Nationalist controlled) Republic of China, and boycotted the meetings. While the Soviet Union was absent, the UN passed a resolution condemning North Korean actions and offering military support to South Korea. After this incident the Soviet Union was never absent at the meetings of the Security Council.See also
- Cold WarCold WarThe Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
- Collectivization
- Communist Party of the Soviet UnionCommunist Party of the Soviet UnionThe Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the only legal, ruling political party in the Soviet Union and one of the largest communist organizations in the world...
- Eastern Front (World War II)Eastern Front (World War II)The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...
- Economy of the Soviet UnionEconomy of the Soviet UnionThe economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was based on a system of state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, industrial manufacturing and centralized administrative planning...
- Great PurgeGreat PurgeThe Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
- GulagGulagThe Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
- History of RussiaHistory of RussiaThe history of Russia begins with that of the Eastern Slavs and the Finno-Ugric peoples. The state of Garðaríki , which was centered in Novgorod and included the entire areas inhabited by Ilmen Slavs, Veps and Votes, was established by the Varangian chieftain Rurik in 862...
- Joseph StalinJoseph StalinJoseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
- Nikita KhrushchevNikita KhrushchevNikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
- Red ArmyRed ArmyThe Workers' and Peasants' Red Army started out as the Soviet Union's revolutionary communist combat groups during the Russian Civil War of 1918-1922. It grew into the national army of the Soviet Union. By the 1930s the Red Army was among the largest armies in history.The "Red Army" name refers to...
- RussiaRussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
- Russian Orthodox ChurchRussian Orthodox ChurchThe Russian Orthodox Church or, alternatively, the Moscow Patriarchate The ROC is often said to be the largest of the Eastern Orthodox churches in the world; including all the autocephalous churches under its umbrella, its adherents number over 150 million worldwide—about half of the 300 million...
- Secret policeSecret policeSecret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
- Soviet artSoviet artSoviet art was the visual art produced in the Soviet Union.-Early years:During the Russian Revolution a movement was initiated to put all arts to service of the dictatorship of the proletariat...
- Soviet calendar
- Soviet historiographySoviet historiographySoviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union . In the USSR, the study of history was marked by alternating periods of freedom allowed and restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , and also by the struggle of historians to...
- Political repression in the Soviet Union
- Politics of the Soviet UnionPolitics of the Soviet UnionThe political system of the Soviet Union was characterized by the superior role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , the only party permitted by Constitution.For information about the government, see Government of the Soviet Union-Background:...
- Soviet UnionSoviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
- SuperpowerSuperpowerA superpower is a state with a dominant position in the international system which has the ability to influence events and its own interests and project power on a worldwide scale to protect those interests...
- Timeline of Russian historyTimeline of Russian historyThis is a timeline of Russian history. To read about the background to these events, see History of Russia. See also the list of leaders of Russia.This timeline is incomplete; some important events may be missing...
- World War II
World War II
- Bellamy, Chris. Absolute War: Soviet Russia in the Second World War (2008), 880pp excerpt and text search
- Broekmeyer, Marius. Stalin, the Russians, and Their War, 1941-1945. 2004. 315 pp.
- Overy, Richard. Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945 (1998) excerpt and text search
- Roberts, Geoffrey. Stalin's Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (2006).
- Seaton, Albert. Stalin as Military Commander, (1998) online edition
Cold war
- Goncharov, Sergei, John Lewis and Litai Xue, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War (1993) excerpt and text search
- Gorlizki, Yoram, and Oleg Khlevniuk. Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (2004) online edition
- Holloway, David. Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (1996) excerpt and text search
- Mastny, Vojtech. Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941–1945 (1979)
- Mastny, Vojtech. The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1998) excerpt and text search; online complete edition
- Taubman, William. Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (2004), Pulitzer Prize; excerpt and text search
- Ulam, Adam B. Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1973, 2nd ed. (1974)
- Zubok, Vladislav M. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (2007)
External links
- Impressions of Soviet Russia, by John Dewey
- Moscow: Stalin 2.0 - video report by Global Post
- USSR in Construction A digital presentation by the University of Saskatchewan of several full issues of the propaganda journal which was published by the USSR government from the years 1930 to 1941.